Rookie's '82 Chevrolet C10

[Rookie]

Yo, Long time no see, I figured that because im about to embark on phase 2 of this heap that I should probably make one of these.

 

Anyway, I needed a new daily so I went shopping and found this sweet 82 long bed, I was after a long bed specifically as I needed/wanted it for my shop truck to haul choppers round with. 

 

The 350 had a sweet cam and gear drive so it sounded cool and had the requisite chop chop but the 4km/l fuel consumption meant that the daily part of the new car purchase didnt work quite so well. Luckily I had done my due diligence before the purchase and also bought a 2005 Mercedes Benz E320 cdi. 

 

Anyway @98cc hit me up and said he wanted to come visit so I put him to work and we pulled the 350 out and swung the OM648 in. Then at some point a @peteretep came and visited so we did some more work, anyway, I had a deadline, I made it, the truck got its maiden voyage with its new motor around Norway chasing a bunch of bikers, good times.

 

Basically the rundown of the swap were:

 

OM648 3.2l inline 6 diesel, the same one the Blacksmoke Racing dudes use.

Baldurs Control Systems DID1 stand alone ECU

722.6 Mercedes 5 speed Auto with lockup

OF Gear TCU 

3 inch intercooler

Built 10 Bolt with 30 spline axles, 9 inch housing ends and bearings, Eaton Trutrac and 3.08 gears.

 

At this point it turned into my summertime daily and did truck things

 

Then doing the usual facebook marketplace thing late at night I found a truck camper for sale, so of course I had to have that...

 

At this point I found the limit of the 1/2 ton suspension so with the camper and the 6/8 drop that it has, so I had to do something, I made a bag over leaf setup in the back to help with load carrying capabillity.

 

So about here is up to date, the engine swap is legit, it now gets 14 km/l and will happily cruise at 120 on the highway, because of the 8 foot bed it hauls all manner of things without asking, and does a skid. 

 

Discussion

[Rookie]

OK, so this is where the story of how my current situation came to be. I was pretty happy with how the truck ran, towed and hauled, but if we rewind to summer last year, I took one of my mates here to see the Malmo race day of the Swedish event StreetWeek, which is a drag and drive event run every year throughout different routes in Sweden. Anyway we floated the idea of participating, I threw it out there that we should use the truck, then I thought a bit more, decided I didnt really want to turn my daily into a drag car, then we ummed and arhhed about buying a 25.5 rolling chassis doing a sloppy LS and going for gold, but the rules to get modified cars street legal (requirement for running StreetWeek) here are dumb so we then put a pause on that idea, at that is bascally where we left it for 6 months.

Anyway so I was just randomly doom scrolling Insta on a sunday night and there was a post about getting ready to sign up for StreetWeek on the coming Tuesday.. So I hit up old mate and said, shouldn't we just try and get a spot then figure out the rest after. Tuesday rolls around and I'm sitting at my computer like a Swifty trying to get a ticket, and low and behold we got one. So now this summer we are doing a drag and drive event that will take us some where 5 hours north of Stockholm. One issue though, the truck whilst a great daily does not a drag car make...

 

Enter Phase 2.

 

 

Basically to get 500 hp out of one of these things isnt too difficult. The formula is pretty tried and true:

Big HPFP

 

custom Injectors, and enough air to burn all that diesel effectively.

 

So out came the Injectors to be sent to Diesel Mekken in Sweden, they should flow around 185mm3 @ 1400uS when I get them back.

 

Next on the list was to remove all the things that we wont be using, and seeings as I already had the injectors out removing the rocker cover makes modifying the front cover for the 400cdi pump easier. The gasket was also leaking so it was a no brainer. This is what I found, notbad.jpg for 500,000km

 

It is almost as if Mercedes themselves planned this, because the holes are all there to mount the bigger pump, just a matter of a bit of a trim on the front cover and everything bolts up.

 

After removing one of the idler pulleys and trimming the oil filter and thermostat housings the everything is good to go.

 

So all in all a win. Next on the list is building the new turbo manifold, it is going to be a compound setup with the HX40 over the stock GT2356, so hopefully I dont lose too much drivability.

[Rookie]

Ok, so the thrash was real and no updates can happen whilst under time pressure. Plan was to get it going for my MC clubs year trip and use it as a sweeper vehicle, long story short, we made it...

 

The basic idea is to put the HX40 compounded over the stock turbo, the goal was to keep the stock drivability but be able to max out the 400 cdi pump.

 

I quickly found out that the C10 engine bay is designed for a SBC and not a Mercedes Diesel with compounds, but never the less these go here...

 

 

[Rookie]

Quickly add a few sch40 stainless T's and bends, then call it a manifold.

Once I was satisfied I could actually make everything fit I got to welding it up.

 

[Rookie]

It was about here that the wastegate showed up. I decided to go for a 50mm VS Racing gen3 wastegate, mostly because I really like the idea of the piston instead of the diaphram, since I will be controlling it with emap then it seemed like it would be more robust.

 

So I'll just put that here...

BTW Don't @ me about the manifold design, things fit where they fit ok...

 

We also pulled the head so we could do valve springs, it seemed prudent with the impending boost.

These things have a o-ringed oil port for the turbo feed, so I made that little adaptor on the front of the cylinder head so I could use the stock oil pressure sender and have a better place to take the oil feeds from.

[Rookie]

Start plumbing all of the 1000 lines up, it is starting to look like a thing at this point.

 

At around 5 pm the night before We had to leave then this happened...

This is what it ended up looking like.

[Rookie]

Around 11 pm everything was back together and a short test run proved that all systems were go. BED TIME...

Early the next morning everything was loaded up and with Alan Jackson on the radio I set off to meet the boys for our 5 day trip around Sweden. Everything was great on the first day, turbos were boosting, beers were drunk and all in all a good time was had.

At some point We had bought some Drag Radials from a dude around Stockholm, I got ZEB to pick them up for me, and I had mentioned that if everything was going well then we could come and get them, so we woke up early and hit the road for the 5 hr each way road trip. all in all it was going well, I had the laptop hooked up datalogging and all was good, we stopped for some diesel and I let my buddy drive, the pull onto the highway from the gas station proved too much for the heater core, which promptly exploded and dumped water into the cabin and vents. We stopped, by passed that and fixed a diesel leak while we were at it, and continued on our way. With me on the laptop and old mate driving we made headway on the tune, with each page up producing school girl giggles and soon enough the 3 bar map sensor was showing 3080 mBar and the egt was 950 degrees in the datalog.

 

All was good, until around half an our out of our destination when the dreaded manifold tick reared it ugly head, not entirely unexpected as I hadn't had time to surface the manifold after welding but it turns out I had a lot to learn about turbo manifold afixing. Anyway, we limped back to base camp and pulled the turbos to try and fix the leak.

It ultimately turned out unsuccessful, but we tried, we limped the rest of the trip and at some point the lift pump relay gave up the ghost, so with that bypassed and many more beers drunk we made it home. 

With only 2 weeks until street week pressure is on, but it seems as if things are do-able...

 

[Rookie]

OKey Dokey folks, buckle up, I've finally pulled finger and have decided to share my tale of StreetWeek 2024. Be warned now, this will take some reading, and, due to the nature of drag and drive, not a lot of photos got taken. 

For those of you who don't know StreetWeek is a 1/8 mile drag and drive event held in Sweden every year, it encompases 7 days, 5 drag strips and around 1500kms of transport. This year was the route called "The Central Swing". Coming into the event we knew which race tracks were on which days but the transport route is set on the day and so you dont really know where or how long the drive is. StreetWeek differs a little from the American drag and drives in that, aside from the first day,the racing is from 14:00- 21:00 with the days checkpoints being released at 19:00. as opposed to dragweek et al running day time drags and afternoon drives.

Aside from the hell week leading up to departure, where everything was pushed to the last minute, everything went to plan, ish... We got around 80-90% of my to do list completed, but kick off is kick off so we had to go.

 

Day 0: Getting There...

 

The first race day was at Mantrop park, and I live in Sorø, so the first I had to pack up the camper and roll out, drive through Copenhagen and pick up my Co-Driver for the week, Philip was the dude that was in the truck with me for the last adventure so all things considered he knew what to expect... ish.

I left home at noon, scrutineering closed at 21:00, we had at least a 6 hour drive, things were tight...

So aside from fixing the exhaust manifold leak, one other notable modification we completed was the fabrication and installation of some homebrew Caltracs, this also ment thay navigation of inner Copenhagen with their perchant for bus sized speed bumps tricky and I ended up getting beached on one, and at the same time the shifter linkage fell off the side of the gearbox. So here we are, stuck on a speed bump with no ability to select reverse to get off it, in the middle of a busy street in downtown Copenhagen. My stress levels were peaking, this was not the start to the trip I needed. Luckily We had all of the tools and everything we needed, so I pulled out the jack and got to work, not without being told how I wasn't allowed to stop in the middle of the road multiple times... Anyway, a bit of safety wire and a boot full of throttle and we were free to carry on our merry way.

From here it was acutally pretty smooth sailing, apart from getting laughed at by the Swedish boarder guard when I told him that I was going drag racing in a campervan. One big plus to the camper is that at highway speed you are basically an inertia dyno, so tuneups can be easily adjusted as needed!

 

When we were within 1½ hours of Mantrop this happened...

 

We ended up getting to Mantrop at around 20:00, in the pissing rain, with only one hour left to get the car scruitineered we husstled the sign in process and got in the queue. This is where our luck begain to change. because it was raining, and we had the camper on we couldn't fit in the inspecton hall, and the scruitineer wasn't all that keen to lie in the puddles to check the car we basically got teched without issue, he did pull us up on the rubber valve stems in the drag slicks, which is apparently an old rule, but he let us go due to being slow. we were teched to run up to 140 kph in the 1/8, faster than that an we needed a engine diaper.

With tech completed we got our armbands and stickers and found a spot to sleep for the night.

[Rookie]

Day 1: Mantorp Park

We woke up to the sound of methanol big blocks and sunshine so all was good. We showed up to the drivers meeting at 08:00, which was in Swedish, so I didn't catch any of it, and then the track opened for racing.

Leading up to the event Philip and I had spent a lot of time speculating about the other cars in the Diesel class, we all got a magazine before the event and in there we were clearly the slowest diesel car out of the 5 entrants. But between ½bad luck and poor time management only 2 of the theoreticaly fast diesel cars showed on the day, and one of the had only been started for the first time ever the day before, unfortunately the diesel class turned out to be a bit of an overflow for the other classes when the real racecars didn't get finished on time.

Due to running out of time there were a few items on the to-do list which needed to be completed, one was an oil change, I hadn't changed the oil since I had done the motor swap so that was a must have, the second was I needed to change the plumbing to the line lock solenoid, unbeknownst to me, they are not solenoid activated valves, but rather solenoid activated one way valves, and as I had plumbed it into the rear brake line instead of the fronts I needed to plumb it up backwards. So with those two taskes complete we set to putting the slicks on and setting the preasures. This is where things got a little funky, I went to set the tyre pressure and one of the drag slicks had no valve in the valve stem... Weird, but anyway, went to the race directors office and bought some of the steel valve stems we needed anyway and stole the valve out of that.  

For reference it had 15 psi in the tyres, 15 psi in the airbags, and the Caltracs were set to light preload.

So with the Truck setup as best as I could guess I queued up.

The first pass was notbad.jpg, going into it I thought running under a 10 would be a good starting point and off the trailer it went 9.15@118 with a 2.0 60'

So I queued back up and ran again, this time with a much better burnout.

This resulted in a 8.81@121 with a 1.90 60',we were stoked with that and packed up for the day, got the check points and rolled out. at 21:00 we looked up the days results, and we were in 2nd place in the Diesel class.

[Rookie]

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[Rookie]

Day 2: Dala-järna

We rolled into Dala-järna around 00:30 and set up camp, had a kip and woke up fresh for a day of racing, on the drive I had given the fuel and boost tables a bit of the old page up action and I was keen to see how this would play out on track. Dala-järna is an unpreped airfield so I knew that we wouldn't be as fast as the day before, but never the less, I riding high on the success of yesterday.

I queued up and did a good burnout, things felt good and I stalled it eup, let rip and it felt good, easily as fast as yesterday, so you can imagine my disappointment when Philip handed me a time slip for 11.35...

So I queue up again, Dala-järna had a weird system where it was a single line and split into two right at the burnout box, so it seemed to be hugely long but it went quickly. This run it was a red light...

So I queued up again, 10.87...

and again, red light...

By this point I was extremely frustrated, I even call on a few of the other races to help figure out what was goin on. I queued up again, and another red light...

This time though Phililp videoed the whole thing, and it became immediately clear what was happening, the 4" exhaust that exits behind the front passenger tyre was bellowing black smoke and tripping the beams. So i jumped on the laptop and changed the control stratergy so that the dump valve would only open when the undriven wheel speed was 3kph. 

Queued up again, but this time it pushed through the beams and we got a 10.30, better but still not good.

One more time, 9.41@127 with a lousy 2.25 60' good enough for 3rd place, and after the shit fight we had we were more than happy to pack up.

By around 21:00 we were ready to hit the road, we got the check points and put them into google, we were in for a long night...

 

Basically as soon as we left we could hear something wasn't right in the diff, there was a metallic rubbing noise, but due to the distance we had to cover we ignored it for as long as we could. After about 45 minutes we pulled over next to a lake and inbetween being eaten alve by mosquitos we figured out that the cage in the drivers side wheel bearing had left the chat.

We tried out life lines, and got the nummber for Lennart from Gibb performance, who was following StreetWeek around with a truck full with rear end components, but the time was around 23:00 at this point so I guess he was in bed already. 

At this point we were around 40kms outside of Mora, so we made the call that we were going to limp there, travelling at 30kph gave us time to figure out a plan, and we made the call that we should park at the tyre shop, as they opened first in the morning and their facebook page had some photos of race cars. We got there, parked up and set the alrams for 05:45.

We got up in the morning and met them as they were coming into work and whist helpful they didn't have a lead on a bearing. The did suggest that 50kms away there was Proshop which dealt in American junk so not all hope was lost.

There was still a bit of time to kill and seeings as the wheel bearing was just a skf ball bearing, we decided to drop into the John Deere dealership and see if there was any luck there, but to no avail.

The guys at the tyre shop had pointed us to the Swedish equivilent of Repco, so we started making out way there, on the way there we stumbled upon a place called MECA, which turned out to be a bit like BNT, more aimed at workshops with tools and parts and things.

So at 7am, fithy, running on instant coffee an around 5 hours sleep, I rocked in there and asked in English ( Swedish is NOT Danish) if they had a wheel bearing for a Ford 9", to which the old guy behind the counter replied "The 80mm one?", it was at this point I knew I had my guy. After a bit of computer work, some looking in the physical parts catalogue, back to the computer, it turned out they had three, a pair and one other brand, I was a bit scared that this might be an ongoing thing so I bought all three. 

I asked if it was fine if we changed it in the parking lot and that was ok by them. So we got to work.

I cut the old bearing off with the angle grinder and using the armco as a work bench I started hammering the new one on.

After ½ hour I decided to ask if they had a press, and it turned out that the old guy had a tractor workshop 3 km away, so I grabbed the axle and jumped in his car. it took around 3 minutes to get it fixed up and ready to go. Turned out old mate only worked part time at MECA to keep the tax man happy and from 11-late he worked under the table fixing tractors for the local forestry industry.

If you ever read this Neils, you saved the day, thank you!

We jammed the axle back in and hit the road, it was around 10am and we still had quite a journey ahead of us.

We made it to the first checkpoint just in time for lunch, so we had food with some of the other StreetWeekers and carried on.

We made it to the second check point and everything was still good. it was about here that it started being very mountainous, and I began wondering where they would fit a drag strip...

Turns out Sundsvall Raceway is an old coldwar air stirp that is on the top of a mountain, the gravel road leading up to it didn't really let on to the excellent track that awaited us.

 

[Rookie]

Day 3: Sundsvall

So after the morning thrash with the wheel bearing we were pretty keen to get a run on the board and then re-evaluate the situation, maybe even take it easy we were in 2nd overall in the class so no stress right...

We were a bit late after the drive and seting up the pits etc but no worries, got everything sorted, even ended up zip-tying a rag in the drum to catch the oil from the destroyed axle seal. got queued up in a mint Swedish summer day.

First pass went well, around a 9.13@125 with an ok 60'. Good enough, or was it...

I had the crazy idea to rearange the boost lines and put some boost onto the top of the wastegate to help it stay closed, up until this point it was just disconected and using the emap to blow it open. To aid with control I wired the wastegate on the hx40 closed and routed the boost to the top of the gate throught the boost control solenoid so I could have some control over it. 

To start with I ran it at 50% duty cycle, lets see what happens...

As a side note you can see the dump valve stratergy still working a cham.

Turns out that was the right thing to do, it cut a 8.76@130, with a 2.0 60'. 

I came back around and the lanes were empty, so I had a quick squiz at the logs and everything was GOOOOD, so I bumped the duty cycle up to 75%

8.63@131 2.0 60' , ripper, that put us into 1st place in the class. But the lanes were still open, and there was more duty cycle to be had. lets see what 100%can do...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is how I ended up being towed back to the pits...

This is the diff over leaf kit i was using, and due to the funny laws in Denmark around modifying cars I hadn't welded the leaf mounts to the diff, they arent ment to be, but then they aren't made for drag racing either. Turned out that on the launch the axle had rotated in the u bolts and torn some of the spring perches off the axle tubes and munted the cups, broke the rear driveshaft u-joint, which then broke the front driveshaft u-joint, all in all a big mess.

The mercedes part of the driveshaft was the difficult part to source, so we got to work asking around the pits if there was any local driveshaft shops that we could coax into action, we got a few leads, but upon walking through the pits, I saw Frederik, one of the other diesel class competitors, who to be quite frank was having a shit of a time, he was runing an old Mercedes with a nastier version of my engine and trans combo. the first day he broke his diff, the second day he had the same issues as me with the timing light, and as it turned out he had broken his gearbox on the drive and had spent all day fighting with it, he was beat, and out. I politely asked him what he was doing with his driveshaft, and he said that if it would help me finish I could have it, so the difficult part was sorted, then I rolled up to the gibb performance truck and after a few trips back and forwards to figure out exactly what it was I was running, I got all of the bits I needed, ok so time for dinner and then get into it.

So this is where things got a bit tricky, I had my tig, and I had a generator, but the generator couldn't run my tig, so I hit up Martin in the Hotrod next to us and I could use his generator, but it had swedish plugs on it so I couldn't plug in my tig, so then I borrowed his tig, and his generator couldn't run that either, but luckily the team to the other side of us had paid for power, but that was 50m away so then I had to scrounge 50m of swedish extension cords, which we managed, and so finally the whole operation was under way.

btw because of the late start time this all occured at around midnight, thankfully we were so far north in Sweden that we basically had the midnight sun, and there was only a period around 02:00 that we needed torches. But we got after it, beat the spring perches back into shape, welded them on, reset the sway bar and caltracs, assembled both driveshafts and got it back on its wheels, we finished at around 04:30, I had the bright idea that we should have the first hot shower of the week and so we hit the sack, set the alarms for 09:00.

 

 

After the most peaceful 4 hours of sleep in my life we woke up, packed up camp and hit the road after the days checkpoints.